[PEACH] HP as SR.

[ace rooster]

One thing that irks me about 3.5 is how common 'dead at full hp' is. Worse than that is the situation where one player does 150 damage and then a SOS hits the target and neutralises it, making the damage done entirely irrelevant. I would like to attempt to address this.

The idea is to grant all characters a special SR based on current HP, with the initial proposal being 5+hp/10, rounding down. I would be tempted to not apply it to spells that only do damage, or have it not cancel out damage. I might include negative levels and ability damage as damage, but that is up for discussion.

It might simplify things to only recompute the SR on your turn, so that you only have to compute it once per turn at most. Any thoughts on whether this would make things easier, and would it be worth it?

Any thoughts?

[Jormengand]

An alternative is to change death magic so that instead of killing characters, it instead does an obscenely large amount of untyped damage (such as 1d20/CL) meaning that a character at full health will survive the attack if they have a lot of health. Also, giving characters options to pay a large amount of health to prevent save-or-suck attacks (shameless plug for the avatar (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?475720-The-Avatar-%28Class-in-30-minutes-PEACH%29), which is one of many of my classes to have this ability) is another possibility. 50 for dead may be slightly low to hand out to everyone (consider doubling all the costs in the table, honestly - compare Power Word Kill).

The problem with SR is that it doesn't really make the problem averted, only less likely. It becomes "SR, or save, or die".

[ace rooster]

An alternative is to change death magic so that instead of killing characters, it instead does an obscenely large amount of untyped damage (such as 1d20/CL) meaning that a character at full health will survive the attack if they have a lot of health. Also, giving characters options to pay a large amount of health to prevent save-or-suck attacks (shameless plug for the avatar (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?475720-The-Avatar-%28Class-in-30-minutes-PEACH%29), which is one of many of my classes to have this ability) is another possibility. 50 for dead may be slightly low to hand out to everyone (consider doubling all the costs in the table, honestly - compare Power Word Kill).

The problem with SR is that it doesn't really make the problem averted, only less likely. It becomes "SR, or save, or die".

Death is only the worst of the SOS effects. Hold person or ghoul touch open the target up to coup de gras, so without support are effectively death.

Burning through health to avoid status effects is certainly a possibility, but If you are doing that you might as well be playing a much simpler system. In particular spells do damage depending on level, with what happens if they finish the target being effectively fluff. In almost all cases you simply take the damage, and magic loses much of the 3.5 character. Still a direction worth exploring, but it discards a huge amount of what makes 3.5 popular.

The idea is that 'softening up' a target now becomes important. If you do damage and then the target gets SOSed you have still contributed, which makes a huge difference to how much fun players have. It's the difference between "well my 120 damage was pointless :smallfrown:" and "great team effort :smallsmile:"

[Jormengand]

Burning through health to avoid status effects is certainly a possibility, but If you are doing that you might as well be playing a much simpler system. In particular spells do damage depending on level, with what happens if they finish the target being effectively fluff. In almost all cases you simply take the damage, and magic loses much of the 3.5 character. Still a direction worth exploring, but it discards a huge amount of what makes 3.5 popular.

The idea is that 'softening up' a target now becomes important. If you do damage and then the target gets SOSed you have still contributed, which makes a huge difference to how much fun players have. It's the difference between "well my 120 damage was pointless :smallfrown:" and "great team effort :smallsmile:"

This is why I think the health costs should be high (moreso than in the table I gave) so it's easy to reduce someone to the point where taking the HP damage is often more dangerous than taking the SoS.